08/31/2026
Your online store just crossed $100K.
You may also have just created a liability that shows up on the day you try to sell.
Here's what most founders don't know: you don't need an office, a warehouse, or an employee in a state to owe it money. Since the Wayfair decision, crossing a revenue or transaction threshold is enough. In most states that line sits around $100K in sales. Some still count transactions instead, where a couple hundred small orders can be enough. Thresholds and lookback periods vary state by state.
A good year on Shopify can quietly register you in a dozen states at once.
We don't think about this as a tax problem. We think about it as a valuation problem.
→ Uncollected sales tax doesn't disappear. It sits on the balance sheet as an unrecorded liability, compounding with penalties and interest, and the clock rarely stops on its own.
→ It is one of the first things a buyer's diligence team goes looking for. We have watched unregistered nexus turn a clean exit into an escrow holdback, or a re-trade on price weeks before close.
→ It is the cheapest problem you will ever solve before someone finds it, and one of the most expensive after.
The founders who come out of diligence clean aren't the ones with the biggest tax team. They're the ones who ran the review the quarter they started growing, not the quarter a buyer asked them to prove it.
If you crossed six figures this year and nobody has mapped where you're now on the hook, that's the review to run this month. It costs a fraction of what it costs to explain later.
Not sure where your revenue actually landed last year? Comment NEXUS or send me a message and we'll walk the map with you.
